The Literary Committee presents Clinton & Moynihan 'In Conversation'

Tonight, January 18, at 8pm, James Panero will host an open lecture & discussion at the National Arts Club on two new political histories. Few American politicians have been as interesting as President Clinton and the late Senator Moynihan. Both pols crossed party lines to become maverick Democrats, tackling thorny social issues in a way that few others have done since. Both had a style that was all their own. Both proved, once again, that all politics is personal. The Literary Committee of the National Arts Club invites you to rediscover these two magnetic figures with a reading and discussion by the author and editor of two new revealing, "conversational" books: Daniel Patrick Moynihan: A Portrait in Letters of an American Visionary, edited by Steven R. Weisman (Yale University Press), and A Complicated Man: The Life of Bill Clinton as Told by Those Who Know Him, by Michael Takiff (Public Affairs)

Criticism's terrible nakedness

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Randall Jarrell at home with Elfi, ca. 1964

Smart comments continue over at "My Jerry Saltz Problem." Number 28 offers a great quote by Randall Jarrell:

“Criticism demands of the critic a terrible nakedness: a real critic has no one but himself to depend on. He can never forget that all he has to go by, finally, is his own response, the self that makes and is made up of such responses — and yet he must regard that self as no more than the instrument through which the art is seen, so that the work of art will seem everything to him and his own self nothing.” — The Age of Criticism, 1952

Here is my essay, "Pictures from an Institution," on Jarrell's fictionalized critique of higher education and graduate life--republished in "Counterpoints: 25 Years of The New Criterion on Culture & the Arts" (Ivan R. Dee).